Auditing

NVFLARE has an auditing mechanism to record events that occur in the system. Both user command events and critical job events generated by the learning process are recorded.

Audit File Location

The audit file audit.txt is located in the root directory of the workspace.

Audit File Format

The audit file is a text file. Each line in the file is an event. Each event contains headers and an optional message. Event headers are enclosed in square brackets. The following are some examples of events:

[E:b6ac4a2a-eb01-4123-b898-758f20dc028d][T:2022-09-13 13:56:01.280558][U:?][A:_cert_login admin@b.org]
[E:16392ed4-d6c7-490a-a84b-12685297e912][T:2022-09-1412:59:47.691957][U:trainer@b.org][A:train.deploy]
[E:636ee230-3534-45a2-9689-d0ec6c90ed45][R:9dbf4179-991b-4d67-be2f-8e4bac1b8eb2][T:2022-09-14 15:08:33.181712][J:c4886aa3-9547-4ba7-902e-eb5e52085bc2][A:train#39027d22-3c70-4438-9c6b-637c380b8669]received task from server

Event Headers

Event headers specify meta information about the event. Each header is expressed with the header type (one character), followed by a colon (:) and the value of the header. The following are defined header types and their values.

Header Type	Meaning	Value
E	Event ID	A UUID for the ID of the event
T	Timestamp	Time of the event
U	User	Name of the user
A	Action	User issued command or job’s task name and ID
J	Job	ID of the job
R	Reference	Reference to peer’s event ID

Most of the headers are self-explanatory, except for the R header. Events can be related. For example, a user command could cause an event to be recorded on both the server and clients. Similarly, a client’s action could cause the server to act on it (e.g. client submitting task results). The R header records the related event ID on the peer. Reference event IDs can help to correlate events across the system.